Random reflections on culture, life and the Universe.
Warning: will regularly include Scottish actors.

Monday, January 09, 2006

On Skiing

As I have the co-ordination of a drunken tortoise (or whatever you may select as your unco-ordinated creature of choice), I laughed like a drain at Tim Dowling's trivial column today on skiing. Yes, it's pretty inconsequential journalism, but it made me giggle:

Stick to your skill level. If you are an extremely good skier, then you and I should be nowhere near each other. Any run on which I am to be found is, by definition, too easy for you, so take your fancy skis swishing elsewhere. You don't see me lying face down in the middle of the black run on the north face, do you?...No, I don't know how fast 30kph is either, but if I am doing anything approaching that speed you should assume that I can't stop. Technically you may have the right of way, but if I were you I wouldn't stand my ground on principle

Hee. I think I am a wise person for not strapping thin sheets of plyboard [or whatever it is that is used] to my feet and attempting to hurtle down a mountain with nothing but the equivalent of a couple of jousting sticks to help me stop. I don't care if my neice and nephew are within travelling distance of Mount Cook, NZ and would shame me with their skills.

3 comments:

I caught about 20 seconds of Ski Sunday the other day, and in the bit I saw, a bloke did the splits at about 100 kph and then landed on his face (looked like he bit his tongue). One of the many sports (like motor sports) enjoyed by those who have no imagination, and therefore no fear.

And the poles don't help you stop. Supposedly they help you turn, though at my middling technical and crappy fitness level quite frankly they just help you stand upright wheezing while thinking "****ing Hell, why am I doing this?" before launching into the next swooping descent.

The swooping descents are quite jolly, though. If you stay off the really scary stuff.

It's funny: because I'm somewhat overweight and unfit for ideal ski-ing, I bog down in soft snow that my wife and daughter zoom over. The upside is that because of my extra weight and the attention I have to pay to what I'm doing, I can ski blissfully on snow that they consider unpleasantly icy.

I understand cross-country ski-ing is good fun if (very) hard work. You can do that in Scotland after even a medium snowfall. The thing we HAVE taken to already is snowshoeing, which we tried in the Alps and intend to do in Ballater. You can trudge across stuff you'd otherwise sink into; going up is rendered comparatively simple; and coming down is wheeee!